[OpenIndiana-discuss] New to the list + SPARC & OpenSolaris

[Gary]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012, Bryan N Iotti wrote:

> I had used OpenIndiana virtualized in VBox and loved it. Mac was really
> starting to piss me off (even worse now), so I set out to learn more about
> what was constantly presented as the best in the business.
> I thought that for about 100€ getting the chance to learn what it was like
> to use Solaris 9 on Sun hardware was a pretty good deal.

Outside of their SunRay line, Oracle no longer sells hardware for the
desktop workstation market. So I expect that OI/Illumos will be the
holdout for things like video card drivers, wireless chipsets, and all
other miscellany that only affect desktop users. That said, I'd agree
that OpenBSD or NetBSD are great alternatives for your older SPARC
hardware as they still support architectures that Sun/Oracle dropped
support for many years ago (q.v. UltraSPARC II, III, IV and 32-bit
kernel for x86 removed in Solaris 11 but still supported in OI).

-Gary